The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method, and more specifically to an apparatus and method for using a supercap for a firehose dump of SRAM write cache data to non-volatile memory.
A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk, or fixed disk drive, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, “drive” refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media.
In today's hard disk drive storage (HDD), data is typically stored on multiple media types before being written on the disk, depending on the types of data, the relative frequency of access, and to improve system performance. In today's HDD, a memory cache is incorporated as a means of increasing the performance of the storage system, so that a portion of the data can be kept in the faster accessed memory. This is typically implemented with static random access memory (SRAM) technology, which is relatively cheap and fast; however, SRAM is volatile so that the user is forced to either ensure that data that is written to the. HDD are safely stored on the disk in the event of a power or component failure, which means that writes to the disk are significantly slower than if they are cached, or to cache the written data and write them to the media later, risking possible data loss.